This invention relates to a prefabricated reach-in refrigerator-freezer and more particularly to a prefabricated set for assembling a reach-in refrigerator-freezer, wherein various panels and refrigerating units are connected with removable joints or disconnected to enable easy assembly or disassembly and to allow the refrigerator-freezer capacity to be freely changed to suitably provide a required capacity alone.
Conventional refrigerator-freezers may be divided into two general types: one which is mass-produced with a given capacity and the other which has a refrigerating unit installed in a refrigerating compartment.
In the former case, a refrigerator-freezer of required capacity can be freely selected and purchased from among many ready-made refrigerator-freezers available in various capacities, but refrigerator-freezers of this type are assembled with their capacity uniformly determined at the manufacturing plant. Such refrigerator-freezers therefore have so much space to make their transportation and storage extremely inconvenient. Furthermore, when the available capacity of an existing refrigerator-freezer becomes less than required due to, for instance, business expansion, the inability to change the capacity of such a ready-made refrigerator-freezer requires another refrigerator-freezer to be purchased to make up the insufficient capacity or a larger-capacity refrigerator-freezer to be purchased to replace the existing refrigerator-freezer.
In the latter case, unlike a ready-made refrigerator-freezer, a refrigerating compartment of adequate capacity can be freely determined and installed but, when the available capacity becomes less than required, the refrigerating compartment must be rebuilt into a larger-capacity one.
In either case, the total inability to change the capacity of a refrigerator-freezer may be coped with by purchasing or installing a larger than required refrigerator-freezer, but such a method is uneconomical as when the available capacity becomes more than required. The above inconvenience may also occur when the available capacity becomes less than required. This problem is particularly serious for business-use refrigerator-freezers.